


Quarantine

by Pixie Unger (Pixel_Runner)



Category: Monsters - Fandom, exophilia - Fandom, girl/monster
Genre: COVID19, F/M, Nyctophobia, Oh my god they were quarantined
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-26
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:27:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23322415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pixel_Runner/pseuds/Pixie%20Unger
Summary: Trapped in the house I've been renovating by a shelter in place order.
Relationships: girl/monster - Relationship
Comments: 42
Kudos: 105





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm just goofing around.

They always say ‘buy the worst house on the best block that you can afford’ and god knows this place was a total shit hole. 800 square feet on an overgrown lot surrounded by McMansions. Hell, I paid less for the place that the land was worth. I’m amazed someone hadn’t bulldozed the place years ago.

To make a long story short, I did not look a gift  house horse in the mouth.

I mean, it wasn’t a total write off. None of the windows were smashed. There were mature fruit trees in the backyard. If you ignored the weeds and rotting fruit, there was a lot of potential. The plumbing was lead pipes and the electrical was knob and tube, but I know people and I could trade favours to get that replaced. The foundations were good and the roof barely leaked.

I spent the summer camping in a tent in the back yard and slowly getting the place winterized enough that I could move it.

It was still a creepy ass house when I did. It had a boiler. I had no idea how to deal with that, but I was learning. And I learned how to ignore the whistles, hissing and banging sounds that went with having a boiler. The old rads were cast iron with pretty little details in the corners.

There were holes in the plaster, but I just ignored them. It wasn’t worth fixing when I was going to gut the place and put up drywall eventually. It just made it easier to get at the plumbing.

I started just living in the kitchen and ignoring the rest of the house. I had disconnected the rest of the electrical and plumbing and was using that as a home base while I renovated outwards from there.

There is nothing quite as creepy as sleeping in a sleeping bag on what were probably asbestos tiles in an old house that makes the weird noises that old houses make. I kept reminding myself that they only seemed louder than normal because the place was empty and there was nothing to muffle the sound. The shrieking had to be the upstairs window that didn’t quite shut properly.

I had the feeling that something was watching me and prayed to god it wasn’t rats.

I was in this for the long haul. Get up, shower at the gym, go to work, come home, renovate until it got dark, shower at the gym, camp out in the kitchen. Not exciting, but satisfying. Let’s face it, this was the only way I was ever going to be able to afford a house.

When the work from home order came, I had to actually get a phone line installed so I could have internet access. Me, my laptop and a kitchen table I rescued from the curbside a while back.

The creepy feeling was worse. I told myself it had to be the isolation kicking in. I skyped with my best friends at night to make up for it. The power was still a bit dodgy and kept going out, but that’s what laptop batteries and cell phones are for, right?

I was sure the cough was from the dust.

The guy delivering groceries left them on the sidewalk instead of the porch. It was fine. I understood completely. I hadn’t done much work on the outside of the building at all. 

I realized I was sneezing a bit when I started having to use toilet paper as kleenex.

I was fine. I was young and healthy. I didn’t have any sick days at work so I was determined to just push through.

I tried to get more rest.

I dreamed about something laying a cool hand on my forehead.

The grocery store was out of thermometers.

I mean, did it really matter if I had a fever? I wasn’t leaving the house to share with anyone.

My cough got worse overnight. I was vaguely aware of someone lifting me up and holding a cup of cool water to my lips. I was so fucking thirsty. 

“You shouldn’t be here,” I mumbled. “I don’t want you to get sick.”

“I won’t,” a rumbling voice assured me.

I didn’t remember making soup, but I jolted into awareness sitting at the table with a steaming bowl in front of me. Chicken noodle out of a can. It’s not that hard to make. I’m sure I could add water and heat in my sleep. Apparently, I just did.

I was so cold that night. I don’t know where the extra blankets came from, but they were there in the morning.

I don’t know how I ordered a bed while I was sick, but it was there and on my credit card. So was the mattress and sheets. It must have been the fever talking when I ordered them. I would not have picked out anything that old fashioned looking.

How did I get all this stuff up to the second floor bedroom? I’m sure I don’t remember stripping the paint off the closet doors. I must be losing my mind. I slept, I ate, I stopped logging in at work. I just needed to concentrate on getting better.

By the time I was able to stay awake for more than an hour at a time, the city was shut down. I was confined to my house whether I liked it or not. I was suddenly glad my fever addled brain had ordered a bed while I still could. 

The watched feeling was worse. I ordered some rat traps with my groceries. I didn’t catch anything. They didn’t take the bait. I swear I heard snickering when I checked them in the morning. That was a new sound for the boiler to make.

“I am losing my mind,” I repeated to myself. Then blushed when I realized I had said it aloud. “And yes, I also talk to myself,” I added for good measure. “At least it is some sound,” I muttered. “I should turn on some music or something.”

Work was officially shut down but I still had the dumpster outback. I spend my awake time cleaning out the other rooms. The advantage of living in a construction zore was all the dust masks. When I needed to actually go out, that might help. In the meantime, I carefully sorted through the things the previous owners had left behind. Some of it was just trash, but there were some old photographs, lost buttons, even a single antique earring.

“No chance of finding a pair, I bet. Still this could be made over into a necklace or something.” Shit. I was talking to myself again, wasn’t I?

I still got tired easily. I dreamed about my mom stroking my hair as I slept.

The footprints I couldn’t explain away.

I had taken down a section of wall and spent the day carrying out the chunks of plaster before microwaving a pizza pop and tucking in early. In the morning there were footprints in the dust. They weren’t mine. They were huge and it was hard to believe they were human. Weird long toes, with the claw tips a little in front were not what I was expecting.

That was the first time I had wanted to leave the house.

I grabbed my stuff and made it to the front yard before I was spotted by a passing patrol car and ordered back inside. I had no idea how to explain that I thought there was some sort of monster living in my house. I was shaking as I went back inside.

“Hello?” I called from the doorway, ready to run. I had no idea where I could even run to. “Um… Is anyone there?” I don’t know what I was expecting. “Hi? Um …. I bought the house, I didn’t know there was any … thing living here. I have been trying to fix it up.”

“I know.”

Fuck. The scratchy, rasping bass voice was not what I was expecting. “I … uh… I can go back to camping in the yard,” I suggested.

“No.”

I waited to hear if he (?) was going to say anything else.

Apparently not.

“Uh … can I stay here? Or no, you don’t even want me camping in the backyard?”

“If I didn’t want you here, I would have had many opportunities to get rid of you.”

Shit. That wasn’t ominous or threatening at all.

With a low chuckle the voice asked, “Did you mean to say that out loud?”

I froze and tried to remember what I had said. Oh. “No, that was an accident. I’m not used to having anyone around to hear me.”

“I always hear you.”

I closed the door and went out to sit in the garden for a moment to think about that. I ended up pacing, swearing and wishing for a cigarette. I hadn’t smoked in years. The sun started to go down and the bugs came out. I was being eaten alive outside. Going inside was scary but he was right. He had lots of time to …

I flung open the door. “Did you order furniture on my credit card?” I demanded.

The laughter that rang out was a whole other level of creepy. I shivered and thought about going back outside. The door pulled itself closed behind me. I spun to look at it and didn’t see anything. I could hear something breathing. I turned again. Nothing.

“If we are both going to live here, can we at least agree on some ground rules?”

“Like what?” was almost purred in my ear. Looking around wildly, I still couldn’t see anything.

I was shaking now. “Is there a way for you to be less scary so I don’t have a heart attack?” I squeaked.

There was nothing but silence. Still my sense of the presence suggested it was gone.

I didn’t sleep that night. I would just start to nod off then jerk myself awake and look wildly around the room. I never saw anything.

Six am, my alarm went off and I could smell coffee.

All the dust had been swept up.

“Hello?” I whispered.

Nothing. I had coffee and cereal and tried not to think about my surprise roommate. I was so tired, I passed out at my computer in the kitchen at some point that morning, only to wake in bed upstairs in the afternoon. “I don’t want you to touch me while I’m sleeping,” I mumbled, painfully aware that there was dick all I could do to stop it.

“Alright,” the voice said, coming from somewhere in the direction of the closet. “But don’t fall asleep at the table then.”

I breathed a faint sigh of relief. I wasn’t expecting the next part.

“You need to eat something now. You are still recovering.”

There was a can of soup heating on the stove. My breakfast dishes were gone. I found them clean and dry in the cupboard. “Thank you,” I whispered. He didn’t reply. As I ate lunch, I was psyching myself into going upstairs to look in the closet. The door had been painted shut when I got the house, but at some point had been stripped down to the bare wood.

I hadn’t worked up the nerve by the time I was done eating. Or washing and drying the dishes. I found myself at the bottom of the stairs staring up at the second floor. Did I really want to see what was in that closet?

No.

But it would be better to look during the light of day.

Eventually, I made it up there. I put my hand on the knob and tried to turn it. It didn’t budge.

“You want rules?” the voice growled behind me. I spun, there was nothing there. “Do not open that door. Do not come into my space.”

I went from trembling from nerves to bolting down the stairs in an instant. I nearly tripped, but felt something - him? - catch me and set me on my feet.

“Careful,” he purred.

I spent the rest of the day in the garden again. I was still out there when the sun went down and the backlight turned on. Then the kitchen light and for a moment I could see something outlined against the antique curtains I hadn’t replaced in the kitchen. I tried to remind myself that he wasn’t necessarily that big. He might just be closer to the light and casting a bigger shadow.

I didn’t believe it, but I tried.

I crept back into the house like a scared child who wasn’t sure how angry their parents were going to be after they had done something wrong. I turned on all the lights on the main floor and stayed in the kitchen away from the stairs.

“Planning on staying up all night?”

I jumped. “How are you always behind me?”

“I live in the shadows. Go to bed.”

“Um… I was thinking, that should be your room, really. Your closet. You picked out the bed. I can just camp down -”

“No. Go to bed.”

“Do you really think I’m going to be able to sleep in a room with a closet that must not be opened? I have read Blue Beard, you know.”

“So have I. The wife gets the house and lives happily ever after.”

“The last wife does,” I pointed out. “The first dozen or so didn’t.”

He chuckled at that. “We made a deal, remember?”

“Are you teasing me? What deal?”

“I don’t touch you in your sleep. You don’t sleep in the kitchen anymore.”

“How big are you?”

The lights flickered and went off.

“Do you want to see me?” he purred, so close that I could feel his breath on my neck.

“Not in the dark,” I squeaked.

“Go to bed.” 

The light snapped back on, leaving me blinking.

I spent the night sitting on the bed with my back pressed against the headboard trying to see the whole room at one. Eventually, I fell asleep.

My alarm did not go off at six. It had been turned off. The coffee was ready but not turned on when I went down stairs. The air smelled faintly of solder. There was a post it stuck to the coffee maker. Fine copperplate handwriting told me:

I have replaced the plumbing

I stared at it dumbly. I had replaced the plumbing to the kitchen sink and the downstairs powder room and had been washing out of the sink since I had been forced to stay home. The only other plumbing was the upstairs bathroom. I pushed the button on the coffee maker and slowly crept upstairs.

Sure enough the stack of copper pipe waiting in the other bedroom was gone. 

Well, not gone. I could see it installed through the holes in the walls. I turned on the tap to the sink and sure enough, I had water. I now had an upstairs, working bathroom with a clawfoot tub.

And no walls.

“I don’t like the idea of you watching me bathe,” I called out. Then I felt like an idiot because if whatever it was had voyeur tendencies, it could have been watching me for months. I tried all the taps and the toilet. Everything worked.

“Thank you,” I mumbled, unsure if I was talking to myself.

“You’re welcome.” It was the least creepy, most normal thing I had heard from him.

\----

When I got back downstairs, there still wasn’t coffee but there was a new note:

Humans who do not sleep start to hallucinate

I crumbled it up, threw it across the room and jabbed the on switch on the coffee maker. Nothing happened. I growled as I plugged it in. The power went out.

“Oh come on! Withholding coffee is cruel and unusual punishment!”

“Sleep.” It sounded like the whole house had murmured that last bit.

I wish I could say I handled it gracefully, but I didn’t. I stomped back up to the bedroom like a petulant child.

I woke to bright sunlight streaming in through the window. The house was quiet and it felt empty for the first time in days. I had a bath and washed my hair and I felt better than I had in days too. Clean and dry and dressed, I bounced into the kitchen to try and turn on the coffee again only to see my laptop snap shut.

It was with a lot of trepidation that I opened it. I was expecting a ridiculous online purchase which is why I stared dumbly at the screen unable to process what I was seeing.

It was a CGI woman with her hands tied to something over her head being railed by a monster to was fingering her clit with one hand and fondling her breasts with the other while her belly distended in rhythm with his thrusts.

“Ugh! Dude! You can NOT watch porn on my laptop!” I shrieked as I frantically tried to close the window.

“Would you rather I watch you?” he asked calmly from somewhere to the left of me.

I breathed out a shaky breath. “OK. Let’s talk about private browser windows and how not to get a computer virus.”

When I got to the end of my tentative explanation, I asked, “Do you need … some alone time?”

There was another house shaking howling laugh.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“You need to eat.”

That brought up a whole other issue. “Do you? Eat I mean. Do you eat? What do you eat?”

“Don’t worry about me. I am not going to eat you. Unless you ask nicely.”

I blushed even further but got out a pan and a skillet meal from the fridge.

I spend the rest of the afternoon weeding the garden. I came in when it got dark, heated up my leftovers from lunch and tried to figure out what to do with myself. The nap had meant that I wasn’t tired for the first time in days.

I wondered what he would do if I watched a movie. I hunted through the cupboards and found a bag of microwave popcorn from before the virus started. Right! I thought. Bowl of popcorn, a movie, skype with a few friends. Pretend none of this was happening.

I wasn’t surprised when the lights went out. That was just a thing now. My computer was still illuminating a bubble around me and B99 was still hilarious.

I wasn’t expecting the bed to dip next to me. That once again raised the question of how to deal with him around others. I hit the mute button. “What are you doing?” I asked icily.

“Not touching you. What are you eating?”

“Human food.”

“Hmmm.”

I unmuted my computer to answer Penny’s question about how stir crazy I was going.

“12/10 on the looney toons scale,” I offered.

She just laughed.

All of the popcorn was gone.

“Ah hell.”

“What’s wrong?” Penny asked.

“All my popcorn is gone,” I grumbled. I didn’t add that I had more than half a bowl left a moment ago. Not eating me, I reminded myself.

“That sucks. Need to pause and get more?”

“I don’t have anymore.”

She just laughed, “But do you still have toilet paper and hand sanitizer?”

I chuckled, “Toilet paper, at least.”

“I should go. It’s getting late,” she said with a yawn.

“Yeah. Good night.” After Penny signed off, I just let Netflix autoplay the next episode.

“Do you need to sleep?” The whisper seemed to come from the direction of the closet but the bed was still dipped under his weight.

My heart leapt to my throat. “How many of you are there?”

“Just me,” he purred too close to my ear. I flung myself away from him. Two hands caught me.

Two other hands caught my laptop.

I stared as it was placed back on the bed a little way in front of me. The hands on my arms were cool and smooth. “What are you?”

“I am me. I have not asked your name. You will not ask mine.”

“My name is on the mail. And my credit card. You know my name,” I pointed out keeping my eyes locked on the screen, fighting the urge to look around.

“Nonetheless.”

This wasn’t going to work, but I had to try. “I would like to be alone now.”

The bed shifted as the weight was removed from the side. The black shadows that could be fingers moved from my computer. The voice said, “Good night” from the direction of the closet. 

I sat frozen. “In the morning, I’m moving the bed to another room.”

“Why?”

“Because the closet is yours and it’s scary being here with you,” I admitted.

“I have never done anything to harm you.”

“You scare the shit out of me multiple times a day.”

There was a long pause before he replied, “And yet you haven’t left.”

“The city is on lock down. I can’t leave.”

“Hmm.” 

I jumped as my laptop snapped shut. I fumbled in the dark trying to find it on my bed, “What are you doing?” I demanded.

“Taking this downstairs. I will not bother you tonight.”

“What-” I started to say, then snapped my mouth shut as the realization that this may be his ‘alone time’.

This time the “Good night,” came from the bedroom door.

In the morning the only thing in my browsing history was netflix. This was less comforting since I had shown him how to clear the cache. I told myself at least the keyboard wasn’t sticky.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Self satisfaction becomes a problem for the home owner and the creature

There was no sign the house had any other occupants for days. I hadn’t been able to drag the mattress out of the room where he had put it. It was heavy and I couldn’t compress it enough to get it through the door.

I went back to working from home. The conference calls helped me feel sane. After a while it was easy to pretend the whole thing was some fever dream. I was pretending, though. I still hadn’t tried to open the closet. Grocery delivery was set on a rotation so that once a week they arrived at the gate. My neighbours had theirs brought right up to the house. Mine were always left at the gate of the picket fence that surrounded the front yard.

I used the hedge trimmers to shape the lilac bushes that the neighbours on each side had planted to obscure their view of my house. I weeded and mowed the lawn wishing for grass seed before just giving up and calling it a meadow. Some of the flowers were even pretty. I chuckled with my friends about how much drywall I was going to need when this was over. We laughed about how it was lucky I was alone instead of having a roommate watching me through the holes in the walls.

Well, they laughed. I sort of more chuckled nervously.

I kept an eye on my laptop battery and there weren’t any unexplained power outages. Everything seemed normal.

Until I was cleaning out the basement and found the wine room. I don’t know wine, but there was a lot of it and the newest bottle that I could find was pre world war two.

I wasn’t expecting it to still be good. It was. It felt ridiculous drinking a hundred year old bottle of red wine with a frozen dinner. I did it anyway.

“Are you still here?” I demanded as I was getting ready for bed.

There was no answer.

I found the box that had my vibrator in it and fell asleep in a sweaty puddle.

I woke up a little hung over and found my vibe squeaky clean on the bathroom sink when I went to brush my teeth. My stomach dropped.

“Were you watching me?” I hissed. I don’t know what sort of reply I was expecting, but I didn’t get one.

Once again, I tried to move the mattress to another room. Once again, I failed. I spent the night wrapped in a blanket, sitting on the floor in the other bedroom, with my laptop plugged in and netflix running to keep me company.

I screamed and stood up when he said from the doorway, “I get lonely too.”

“Jesus Christ!”

He chuckled, “Not even close.” There was a moment of silence as I strained my eyes to see something, anything, in the dark. “I can’t leave either,” he whispered. I stood there shaking in the light from my laptop screen. “Sleep in the bed. I will not bother you.”

I didn’t move. He had just sounded sad when he said it. 

“Why can’t I ever see you?” I asked.

“I live in the shadows, you can only see me in darkness.”

I blinked at that. “But you are always here.”

“Yes.”

“And I can’t see in the dark,” I pointed out.

“I know.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I changed the subject. “What do you want from me?”

“When you first arrived, you slept in the garden. If you had started by sleeping in the house, I would have run you off. But you were fixing things, so I let you stay. I got used to you being around. Then you got sick and it would have been so easy to just let you die. I would have gone back to being on my own. I no longer want to be on my own but I hadn’t considered the weight of you being unable to leave. I do not like the idea of you being scared of me and trapped here.”

“But I am,” I mumbled.

“Yes. So take care of yourself. Sleep in the bed. Care for the house. I will stay out of your way.”

I licked my lips. I didn’t want to ask but I had to know. “What were you doing with my vibrator?”

There was no answer. I waited for what felt like an eternity before I continued. “Look, it isn’t a good idea to share sex toys, so depending on where it’s been, I might need to throw it out. I can’t exactly get a new one just now. Please just tell me.”

It was the barest whisper, “I wanted to taste you.”

I froze feeling like a deer in the headlights, completely unsure how to respond to that.

“I have not touched you since you asked me not to,” he argued. 

Except for when I almost fell, I thought. You caught me then. And my laptop. I wouldn’t have been able to get a new one of those either. I wondered if soap and water would do it or if I was going to end up with some shadow monster disease. How do you even ask that?

“Ok,” I mumbled. I stood there in the dark and silence. The house was silent. I realized I hadn’t heard rattles or banging or hissing since I learned he was here. “Nyctophobia,” I blurted out.

“I don’t understand,” he replied.

I shifted awkwardly. “Can I call you Nick?”

The silence continued. Then, “Why?”

“Nameless things are more scary. It isn’t as bad having a roommate named Nick.”

He never did answer. Eventually, I sat back down on the floor and wrapped the blanket more tightly around myself. I wasn’t brave enough to walk through a pitch dark house, past a staircase, to get to the room where there was a monster in the closet. 

\----

There was coffee waiting for me when I got up, and the smell of cinnamon buns baking in the oven. The oven timer said there was 10 minutes left. I peeked inside to find the tiniest pan of monkey bread baking. I recognized the recipe and pulled out the cookbook it came from. Sure enough, in Nick’s careful handwriting was notations about scaling the recipe down to one sixth of how it had been published.

He had used pencil.

“Is this a peace offering?” I asked.

I didn’t get a response, but he did the dishes while I had my bath that morning.

When my groceries were delivered, popcorn had been added to my order.

I didn’t see him. Well, I mean, I never see him, but the only signs of him were things being done and left obviously done while I was bathing or getting dressed. Aside from how nice it was to not do the dishes I appreciated the signs that he was not watching me.

It came as a surprise when I went to put the popcorn in the microwave and the power went out. 

“Nick? What are you doing?”

“This isn’t me,” he hissed.

I was lifted and carried squirming through the dark before being pushed into a space and having the door locked behind me. I panicked as I thought I might be in his closet before I realized I was in the wine cellar. Flashes of Edgar Allen Poe stories ran through my mind.

I have no idea how long I was in there, in the dark with my heart pounding as I tried to get the door to open. Eventually, it did.

“All better now,” he assured me, breathing down the back of my neck.

There were a lot of cop cars outside on the street.

“What happened?” I asked. There wasn’t any answer.

A uniformed officer rang my bell, then politely stepped back from my door the requisite six feet.

“Did you hear or see anything unusual last night, Ma’am?” he asked after identifying himself.

Yeah, all the time, I thought. There was still no way to say that and sound sane. I went with a modified version of the truth. “The power went out around 10pm and I ended up stuck in the basement since I couldn’t see the stairs.”

He frowned at me. “Have you noticed anything missing? Any signs of a break in?”

“No? Should I have?”

He appeared to consider this, then stepped further back to look at the state of my house. “There were break ins all down this street last night. This place might not have been a target.”

“Is everyone OK?” I asked.

“It’s an ongoing investigation,” replied walking towards me again. “I can not disclose anything further, ma’am.”

I swallowed, “That sounds like a no.”

“Do you mind if I come in and have a look around?”

I considered this, “Do you generally advise that women living alone let strange men into their houses? If you are coming to search, I want my lawyer here as a witness.”

He was already peering in around me. The house isn’t that big and the walls were all gone. He could see the whole main floor whether he came in or not.

“Doing some renovations I see.”

No shit Sherlock. “My building permit is posted in my window. I haven’t been able to get trades people out in months but-”

“I'm sure everything is in order with that. Good day.” Then he left. Standing on the porch I could hear him telling the other officers what a shit hole my house was. He thought it should be condemned.

I mean, he was right, still you never like to hear that. And it didn’t need to be condemned. I had the structural engineer’s report to prove it.

I went to work while keeping an eye on the news sites.

It wasn’t break ins. It was looters. The house next to me and the four next to it, all the way to the corner, had been hit. The owners had been found tied up at best and dead at worst with a variety of options in between.

It has escalated all the way down the street.

Then stopped before my house.

“Nick? What did you do?”

He wasn’t talking to me yet.

\----

I sat on my bed and waited for the sun to go down. My laptop was in the kitchen. My phone was next to me but set to do not disturb. I waited, straining my ears for any noise.

“Are you there?”

Nothing was said but I was sure I could feel him watching me.

“Please tell me what happened.”

“No one comes into my house,” he snarled.

I swallowed and fought down my fear. “I did.”

“You are different. You are helping.”

I considered that. He had walls before I got here, now he didn’t.

“Am I safe from you?”   
  


“Yes.” It would have been more comforting if he hadn’t growled it.

That was the point where I started to cry. I had made it through everything life had thrown at me without turning into a weepy woman, but that did it. I’m going to blame it on a night of panicking in the wine cellar combined with news reports detailing what had happened to my neighbours.

“Please don’t,” he whispered.

I sniffled. “Fuck. Why don’t I have kleenex?”

A roll of toilet paper was pressed into my hands. I ripped off a length and blew my nose in a way that women in the movies never do, then I jumped as he stroked my cheek with a cool finger, catching my tears. His hand was gone an instant later.

“What if they come back tonight?”

“They won’t,” he said firmly. I don’t think he was talking about the ongoing police presence on the street. 

“What did you do?” I sniffled.

“I defended my home. That includes you now.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. I wasn’t sure that I couldn’t catch glimpses of him as the lights on the street kept flashing. Red, blue, huge black shadow.

“I don’t want to be alone right now,” I whispered.

The bed dipped but when I reached my arm out in that direction all I could find was a long fingered hand to hold mine. “You won’t be.”

I felt him tug at the blankets underneath me and I slid over so he could turn them back. Even in the dark I could find my sleep shirt under my pillow. I stood up next to the bed, stripped and pulled it over my head. Under the covers looking at the ceiling. Red, blue, shadow, red, blue shadow.

“Are you .. human shaped?”

“I can be.”

I snorted, “What kind of answer is that?” 

“An honest one.”

I rolled on to my side so that my back was to him, or at least to where I thought he was.

“I can go.”

“Can you stay?”

The weight on the bed changed. “Don’t try to look at me, you will only give yourself nightmares.”

“You said you’ve read Blue Beard?”

“Yes.”

“Have you read Cupid and Psyche?”

He just snickered.

“I’ll take that as a yes. Does any of that apply here?”

“Are you going to try to burn me with an oil lamp?” he teased.

“Are you going to get me pregnant then cast me out into the wilds?” I countered.

He hissed at that, “Never.”

“Never get me pregnant or -”

“I’m not human. We can’t procreate. I can’t make you sick. You can’t make me sick. We can drive each other insane and you will be able to escape someday. I can not leave.”

“Why not?”

“You need to rest. Don’t ask questions with scary answers.”

“How am I supposed to know they are scary?”

“Because you are asking a monster. Now, go to sleep.”

That was the most ridiculous thing but I wasn’t up to arguing about it. Not while there was still an active crime scene next door.

I fell asleep to the feeling of him stroking my back.

\----

The only furniture in the bed room was the bed and a few boxes of random stuff I had moved in. I woke to find one of them had been used as a table and was holding breakfast for me. Or at least a travel mug of coffee and a plate of toast. I sat in bed, drank my coffee, ate my toast and read the thirty seven emails from everyone I knew asking what the fuck happened next door.

I ended up posting a blanket statement on facebook that I was fine. I was still in my house. I had no idea what had happened other than what I had seen on the news. Then I posted a picture of the three squad cars I could still see out my bedroom window. 

My boss emailed me to ask when he could expect the report I had been assigned, so that took up the rest of my day. It was getting dark when I realized I hadn’t eaten all day. Another freezer meal, some salad and I was raiding the wine cellar again, god damn it!

As I was pouring wine into a coffee mug, he asked me, “Are you drinking alone?”

I got up, took another mug out of the cupboard, poured a second drink and turned off the kitchen light. “Nope. I’m not alone. You’re here.”

He didn’t answer, as I ate my dinner by the light of the street lights outside. The porch light was outside the kitchen window, so I turned it on to wash the dishes then turned it off to go upstairs. It would have been better if I hadn’t stubbed my toe on the bottom step. I swore. Nick picked me up and carried me up the stairs.

“I didn’t have that much to drink!” I protested.

“No, but you can’t see in the dark.” He tucked me safely into bed.

“Did you change the sheets?” I asked. He didn’t answer. “You did, didn’t you?”

My laptop opened and his body blocked the screen for a few moments. Then Brooklyn 99 came on and it was set next to me.

“Why are you doing this?”

“We need a distraction. Call Penny.”

“We need a distraction? We?”

“Yes.”

I hesitated. “Do you need me to move out and camp in the backyard for a few days?”

His reply was a nonverbal roar that rattled the windows and set off a car alarm outside. 

There was a commotion then the cops were knocking on my door. I sighed and turned on the lights. I decided to be proactive this time. I flung open the door and demanded “What the hell are you doing out here?”

The cops on my porch blinked. 

“I’m trying to sleep! Can you keep the noise down? Please? I know whatever you are doing is important but can you just do it a little quieter?”

“That wasn’t us!” the youngest protested.

“Then can you find out who it was and make them stop?”

To my delight, they left.

I closed the door, smiled to myself and bounced off a wall of darkness that caught me before I rebounded against the door.

“I do not want you sleeping outside!” he growled in my ear.

There were one set of arms around my shoulders and another holding my hips and back. I tried to think of a ‘what big arms you have Mr Wolf’ quip but it died on my lips and the touch was gone in an instant.

“Nick? Can you help me not trip on things on my way to the stairs?”

Hands on my hips, pushing me gently forward and steering me around boxes. Another hand guiding mine to the banister. Then nothing. I carefully inched my way upstairs. I did that awkward thing at the top where you think there is still one more step but there isn’t so your leg falls through nothing and you stumble. To my right was the bedroom, still lit by the flickering screen of my computer.

I climbed into bed and closed it.

Then I opened it, stared at the browser for a moment, then closed it again.

“What’s wrong?”

I considered this. I really had no secrets from him anymore. “I need … some ‘alone time’ but it’s weird if you are watching.”

“Would it be better if I was helping?” he teased.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t know what you are working with. But I feel lonely.”

Gentle fingers took my hand and raised it. The lips that kissed and the tongue that laved were not human. I turned my hand to stroke his face but he leaned away.

That stung. I let my hand fall to the bed. “It isn’t fair that you get to touch me but I can’t touch you.”

He didn’t say anything to that. A car drove past and the headlights lit the room for an instant. Long enough for me to see four glittering eyes watching me, two forward facing and two further to the sides. Not human, I reminded myself. In the darkness, hand cupped my face, thick lips caught mine and as I kissed him a tentacle like tongue licked at my lips before darting briefly down my throat.

“I can do better than that toy,” he promised, “but you can not see me.”

I nodded. Four hands stroking me over my clothes. A mouth kissing and licking at my neck. I was expecting him to peel me out of my clothes, instead his touch was so feathery gentle. Hands cupped my face as he nuzzled my hair. I strained my eyes trying to see him, but I could catch only the faintest outline. Any time I reached out for him he pulled away. Finally, he got frustrated with that and pinned my hands over my head.

I panicked and pulled my hands away and just like that he was gone.

“Nick?”

I don’t know why I was expecting an answer. I groaned and pressed both palms to my face covering my eyes. I jumped when he caressed my calf, but I didn’t move my hands.

“What are you doing, little girl?”

“Damned if I know,” I admitted. “It’s been … I don’t even know anymore… how long have I been stuck in this house? Weeks? Months? None of this seems real anymore. Sometimes I don’t know if I’m real anymore either. I just need … something.”

“Someone,” he whispered.

“Yeah. Someone to make me feel like I’m real. Just to make me feel.”

“Humans need other humans to be human,” he muttered. “You should have just called your friend.”

My eyes prickled again and tears splashed against my hands. “How long have you been here?”

“There was an accident shortly after the house was built. I was created out of that.”

That raised a lot of questions, but my immediate one was, “How long have you been here alone?”

“On and off since then. Most people don’t last much more than a month or two. Normally, construction crews are the advance party before they move in. It’s easy enough to get rid of the new owners. You were just too stupid to leave.”

I snorted, “Were you really trying to make me go? Because living here was creepy but not anywhere close to the scariest place I’ve ever lived.”

“My heart wasn’t in it. I need you to finish fixing the place first. Sooner or later someone would have built one of those ridiculous houses on the lot.” He started to massage my calf as he spoke.

“The house is more than a hundred years old. That’s a long time to be alone,” I pointed out.

“Enough time to get good at it,” he countered.

I moved my hands then and sat up to look at him. I thought I could see a pool of shifting darkness. “What are you? Are you a ghost? Did someone die here and -”

“Many people have died here. I am not one of them.”

I thought about that for a moment. “Am I?”

“What?”

“Am I some dead woman who is all alone here making excuses for why I can’t leave?”

He laughed at me then, “How did you come up with that ridiculous idea?”

It stung a little, “It’s a popular plot point in a number of movies. And I can’t help but notice you didn’t answer the question.”

He stopped laughing when he realized I was serious and said flatly, “You aren’t dead.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [This was/is being live streamed but I don't have a good sense of when I will be writing just now](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NINwxJI-12hXRNvcKShy6uxtfuEfrD7kmX54zJ77s94/edit?usp=sharing)
> 
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NINwxJI-12hXRNvcKShy6uxtfuEfrD7kmX54zJ77s94/edit?usp=sharing


	3. Chapter 3

It would have been nice to have something other than the word of a shadow to go on. I stared at the ceiling. I wished I had a cat or a dog or - hell - a pet hamster. Some other living thing in the house. I had no idea what Nick was but I wasn’t entirely sure he counted as a living thing.

“Humans who don’t sleep start to hallucinate,” I muttered to myself. Maybe if I actually got some shut eye, I would wake up and this would all be a dream. “Fuck it.” I got undressed and crawled under the covers. I settled under the covers, then realized I was facing the closet, so I rolled over. Having the door in my blind spot wasn’t necessarily better.

“Nick?” I wasn’t really expecting an answer. “Can you move the bed to another room?”

“I can. I don’t want to. I like having you where I can see you.”

I nodded. “I’ll go sit in the kitchen until dawn.”

“Go! To! Sleep!”

I jumped then started to shake. “Yelling at me isn’t going to help me sleep,” I muttered.

The bedroom door slammed shut. Rattling the door knob and pulling as hard as I could didn’t make it budge. “Please don’t do this,” I whimpered, then I screamed as something brushed my face.

The door opened suddenly enough that I unbalanced and fell on my ass, but a moment later I was running down the stairs and out the front door. I was at the gate before I knew what I was doing.

The cops were still right there.

“You need to go back inside ma’am!” the closest one called. After that they were all looking at me. 

I paced for a moment, uncomfortably aware how odd I was behaving. I needed to get out of here. I needed a smoke. I needed to stop acting weird before they decided I had killed my neighbours.

Oh god. I was trapped in a house with a creature that probably killed the looters.

I didn’t want to face the idea that Nick was a killer.

“Ma’am! Go inside!”

“I saw what happened on the news,” I explained. “It’s giving me nightmares and I’ve been stuck in that house for more than a month. I wasn’t expecting to be quarantined in a construction site.”

“Be that as it may, you need to go back inside,” the patrolman called.

“I’m more than six feet away from you. Can’t I just stay out here near some other people and the street lights? Please?”

“You aren’t exactly dressed for the weather,” he pointed out. 

I crossed my arms over my chest as I realized I was standing on my lawn in my night dress. I should go in and at least get my robe. It was in the room with Nick’s closet.

I thought about just confessing to something so that I could go with them. Prison wouldn’t have Nick. Maybe I just needed a hospital. No. That was a death sentence these days.

He was driving me off. He had flat out told me that he was good at that.

“Are you alright, ma’am?”

“No!” I snapped. “I’m scared.”

He gave me a pitying look but still insisted, “You need to go inside now. You will be safe in your house.”

I snorted, and swatted at the bugs that had found me.

“Go inside,” he said gently. “The last thing you need is to catch something from the mosquitos.”

I nodded slowly and headed back in to sit in the kitchen. Maybe he would let me make a pot of coffee. When I got inside the lights in the kitchen was on and the bed was set up on the main floor.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

“You’re welcome. This is temporary. You will sleep upstairs when the walls are repaired.

The next morning I got a phone call ordering me out into the garden as a forklift delivered a load of drywall. It was left in the middle of the floor next to my bed. I looked at it. Nick’s voice was too close to my ear, “Someone will come hang in tomorrow.”

“How did you pay for this?”

“You have an excellent credit rating and you aren’t spending much of your money.”

“Great. Did they say how long it would take?”

There was no answer to that.

“I guess drywallers wear masks all the time anyway,” I mused. “At least there will be some other people around.”

“Yes.”

I didn’t have walls the next day. In fact things were worse as the last of the lath and plaster was taken down. They found hundreds of razor blades in the wall in the bathroom. The construction guys assured me that it was normal to find all kinds of weird things in the walls of old houses, but they still looked uncomfortable that it was razor blades and that some of them were more bloody than you would expect from a mere shaving accident. I spent the night picking them up with tweezers and dropping them into a jar for safe disposal. Nick didn’t say a word and the lights stayed on that night.

One half the team turned up the next day. No one commented on why that was.

I ordered a hammock and a grill for the backyard. I got the hammock but someone had changed the grill to a chiminea when I wasn’t looking. It was nice, but I couldn’t cook on it. My order had also been edited to include a bunch of bug repellant candles and some sunscreen. I tried to figure out if that was something a shadow creature would actually do or was this another sign that I was losing my mind.

Either way, I worked on the concrete table out back at the very limit of the wifi during the day and concentrated on fixing up the yard after official work hours.

One of the drywallers sold me a patio umbrella.

I also got the lecture that just because the walls were up didn’t mean that it was safe to use the shower. 

“You still have to get a membrane installed and your tiles up and sealed,” the guy explained.

I nodded, “You don’t happen to know a tile guy that is still working?”

He frowned, “I’ll ask around. Do you have tiles yet?”

“No,” I admitted.

“That might be the hard part. You can still find a few guys willing to come out, but all the factories are shut down.”

“Shit.”

He gave me a look of sympathy. “Yeah. There are stories of people doing penny walls or using their grandma’s china to tile just so they have a working bathroom.”

“I don’t have either of those things,” I said sadly.

He nodded, “I’ll ask around. It isn’t a big project and people might have some leftovers.”

Given how protective Nick was of the house I should have expected his warning. I was still unimpressed to see “no ugly tile” written on the drywall in the morning. Still, he could have used the last of my lipstick and instead had found a pencil somewhere. I tried to ignore it as I brushed my teeth. I didn’t even have a mirror over the sink. Grumbling around the toothbrush I realized, “Fuck. I’m the only person who could buy a haunted house where the ghost had been watching too much HGTV.”

That earned me a creepy house shaking laugh and proof that he hadn’t just left.

“It’s your fault,” he purred in my ear. “You are the one who fell asleep all those nights with decorating shows playing on repeat on your computer.”

I sighed. “Yeah, it was,” I agreed sadly. “If I hadn’t would you be haunting me right now?”

“If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t have seen the value in what you are doing and I wouldn’t have spent a week keeping you alive when you got sick. Perhaps you would have been haunting me.”

I frowned, “I wasn’t sick for a week! It was only a couple of days!”

“You should check your calendar. It was a couple of days of you being sick and a week of me forcing you to breathe.”

“There is no way I lost a week without noticing!”

He didn’t say anything. When I checked my calendar there were nearly two weeks missing. I told myself it didn’t mean anything. Nick used my computer, he could have just deleted the information. I could just call work or Penny or someone and ask how long I was away for.

I kind of didn’t want to. What if he was telling the truth?

I took my coffee and toast and ate breakfast outside, once again wishing for a cigarette. Nick had never left the house, as far as I knew, and I didn’t want to talk to him just then. This was ridiculous! Shadow monsters didn’t … do that! They didn’t … exist. I was just … this wasn’t happening!

I was out of coffee and the coldness of the concrete bench was soaking through my night shirt and into my ass. I had left the folded towel I used as a cushion inside overnight so it wouldn’t get damp. Now I was cold and damp instead. Fuck.

When I made it back to the kitchen, my laptop was open and had apparently been searching for bathroom tiles. ‘Fine. Whatever. Pick something nice that I can afford.”

I don’t know what I was expecting him to do, but contacting a local stained glass artist wasn’t it. I really wasn’t expecting her to check if it was OK if my boyfriend picked out the design since it was my credit  card that was paying for it.

I was afraid to ask, but I had to know, “What did he pick?”

Nancy cleared her throat, “Well, originally he wanted a reproduction of a stained glass window from Maison Schott in France. But when we talked about how complicated it would be for a tiler to install that, he settled on a simpler rose on trellis pattern.”

I set down the phone to close my eyes and scrub my face. “Do you like what he picked out?” She seemed a little taken aback by the question. “Yes? It’s a little modern for your age of house, but it’s a nice piece and will be easy to install. It mostly uses different textured white glass, so it would be in keeping with a white bathroom. I can have it ready next week. I’m not exactly over run with work right now.” She paused before she added, “I’ll send you some sketches and if there is anything you need changed, just let me know. I could really use the income, to be honest.”

“Yeah. I understand that. I guess I’m just doing my part to keep the economy running.”

“I really appreciate that. The whole ‘buy local’ movement ended when we weren’t allowed to leave our houses,” Nancy pointed out.

“Ok. Send me the sketches and the quote and I’ll get back to you in the next couple of days.”

I lay in bed that night and looked at the newly drywalled dining room ceiling. “What are you doing, Nick?”

“Making a home for you,” he whispered.

“Can I even afford this? You don’t have a secret money vault hidden in the walls with the razor blades, do you?”

There was a long moment of silence, then he whispered, “You could sell the wine instead of drinking it.”

I froze. “Just because it’s old doesn’t mean that it’s valuable,” I pointed out.

Something caressed my calf as he purred his reply, “But it is.”

I closed my eyes and let my body melt into the mattress. My breath caught in my throat as the touch moved up my leg. As soon as I made the noise, the contact vanished. I groaned.

“What are you doing?”

“Breaking the rules,” he grumbled from across the room.

I needed to know, “Why were there razor blades in the walls?”

“There was a slot in the back of the medicine cabinet for used razor blades to be dropped between the wall boards so that they were safe and wouldn’t hurt anyone in the trash. That was perfectly normal at one point in history,” he explained.

I considered this, “Why were there bloody razor blades in the walls?”

He didn’t answer that one. “Why haven’t you used your little toy since I cleaned it for you?”

Now it was my turn to be silent.

“You liked that toy,” he prompted. “I liked watching you enjoy yourself. Good for everyone.”

“That’s really creepy. Can’t you just watch porn like a normal person?”

“Porn isn’t as satisfying,” he replied. Then he added, “For either of us. And I am not a normal person.”

“I noticed.”

“Would we have fucked by now if I was?” he just sounded curious. The vocal leer from a moment ago was gone.

“I would have had you arrested by now if you were.”

The low chuckle rumbled through the house at that. I closed my eyes and he stroked my face. “Let me watch,” he purred. “I can feel how badly you want.”

That made my eyes snap open. “What?”

“I can taste your fear, but also your pleasure. I enjoyed watching you cum in a way that humans can not understand. And I am very aware of your frustration.”

“What happens to my soul if a shadow … creature watches me play with myself?”

“It gets to live in a house with a happier guardian?” he suggested.

“A guardian? Is that what you are?”

“Guardian sounds better than monster or eldritch god but that’s just semantics.”

“I’m pretty sure there is a difference,” I pointed out.

“Perhaps the difference is what I’m doing at the time. And right now, I am guarding this house, taking care of you and hoping you will take care of yourself.”

“Is that what the kids are calling it these days?” I joked. “I’m too damn tired!” I thought for a moment, “I need more rules, Nick.”

“Like what?” he asked in a breathy hissing rasp that sounded pretty much like how I imagined a death rattle would sound.

“Well, there’s that,” I pointed out. “Now I’m scared and I can’t see you so this is going to be another night of sitting up until I fall down.”

“You need to rest,” he murmured in a more normal voice for him. It wasn’t human sounding, but it wasn’t deliberately scary.

I had already set up and was fumbling for a light switch. I shrieked when he caught my hand. “Ugh! Look, either I get to sleep or you get to scare me, but you have to pick one. And I can’t see when you are going to touch me, so it’s scary every time. That’s why I asked you not to. But if you can’t do that, can you at least tell me when it’s coming?”

“Would that really make it better if you knew I was going to lick my way up your back?”

“It would if I knew you would listen when I tell you not to. This is about trust, Nick. I don’t trust you. I am already very aware of how vulnerable I am here. You could easily lock me in the basement and wait for me to starve to death. You could smother me with my pillow. Hell, you could slice open an artery and hide the razor blade in the walls.” I stopped abruptly, wondering if I was just giving him ideas. “I can’t stop you and I can’t leave and I can’t trust you not to lock me in the bedroom because you think that will help me sleep.” He let go of my hand. I turned on the light and looked around the empty house. “My head hurts and I don’t want to be afraid any more.”

“I have never done anything to hurt you, but I can see how I have done things that are frightening.” It sounded like a whisper on the very edge of hearing. “Turn out the light, lay down and I will rub your back until you can sleep. I will do my very best not to be scary.”

I turned on my laptop as a source of light and sound before I turned off the light switch. “I can’t believe I am saying this, but if you want this to be less scary for me, find me a nightlight. I haven’t needed one since I was ten, but, congratulations, I do now.”

I felt the bed dip. It didn’t always do that. “I’m going to rub your back now,” he whispered. “You can tell me to stop.”

“Ok,” I acknowledge.

It wasn’t a massage; it was more like a person petting a cat. He started at the top of my head and stroked back to my waist, then stopped and started again. It was vaguely soothing and I was really exhausted by then. At some point in the night I woke to see a huge black shape hunched over my keyboard.

In the morning I had emails confirming my order of six cartoon animal night lights from IKEA and one from an auction house saying they would be happy to broker the sale of my wine and that they would send an expert to confirm its authenticity. 

I wondered how you forge wine.


End file.
